The name Roger Stone does not appear in the Guardian story reporting that the January 6 Committee will soon seek more information on Trump’s calls to the Willard Hotel late on January 5 and on January 6, as he faced the prospect that Mike Pence would not violate his oath and fail to certify the legitimate winner of the election.
Congressman Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, has said the panel will open an inquiry into Donald Trump’s phone call seeking to stop Joe Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January hours before the insurrection.
The chairman said the select committee intended to scrutinize the phone call – revealed last month by the Guardian – should they prevail in their legal effort to obtain Trump White House records over the former president’s objections of executive privilege.
“That’s right,” Thompson said when asked by the Guardian whether the select committee would look into Trump’s phone call, and suggested House investigators had already started to consider ways to investigate Trump’s demand that Biden not be certified as president on 6 January.
Thompson said the select committee could not ask the National Archives for records about specific calls, but noted “if we say we want all White House calls made on January 5 and 6, if he made it on a White House phone, then obviously we would look at it there.”
Instead, the story lists a bunch of people who have been even less cooperative with the Jan 6 investigation than Stone.
The former president’s remarks came as part of wider discussions he had with the lieutenants at the Willard – a team led by Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn and Trump strategist Steve Bannon – about delaying the certification, the sources said.
The story also mentions that the Jan 6 Committee is finally considering a subpoena to Rudy Giuliani — a subpoena that will hit just as debates over crime-fraud excepted conversations start to appear on the SDNY docket.
A spokesperson for the select committee declined to comment about what else such a line of inquiry might involve. But a subpoena to Giuliani, the lead Trump lawyer at the Willard, is understood to be in the offing, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The underlying Guardian story had noted that the calls to the Willard proved a direct tie between the White House and the war room.
Trump’s remarks reveal a direct line from the White House and the command center at the Willard.
The reason I raise Stone is that the repeated reports from Joshua James to Oath Keeper field commander Mike Simmons about a VIP disgruntled about his shoddy treatment — a VIP that is almost certainly Stone — show there was a direct tie from the Willard to one of several militias who were instrumental in breaching the Capitol from multiple points.
Particularly given the confirmation that the government believes he was lying, I’d like to point to some redacted references to a VIP that Joshua James was guarding who was bitching that he wasn’t getting VIP treatment.
This is likely Roger Stone. That’s true because — as Dan Friedman reported — James was “guarding” Stone that day (and Simmons guarded Stone the previous day), the name seems to fit, and Stone has publicly complained about his treatment that day.
While exchanging calls with Simmons, James traveled from the Willard Hotel, in downtown Washington—where he had been leading a security detail guarding Stone—to the Capitol.
What appears to be the first reference to this person also seems to fit the name, which would be the full name, Roger Stone, on first reference. Roberto Minuta, Jonathan Walden, and the now-cooperating Mark Grods were also guarding Stone.
Which brings us to the middle reference. Simmons claims that James called him every time his VIP moved.
Only, if that VIP was Roger Stone, he didn’t move. By his own account he stayed at the Willard before taking his bruised ego and leaving town.
If that’s right, it means Simmons was trying to explain multiple calls with James, and to do so, he offered the bullshit excuse that Stone, who by his own account never left the Willard, kept moving.
These reports in on said VIP’s non-movement would have taken place the morning before the assault on the Capitol, during the same period when, the Guardian reports, Trump alerted the Willard war room that Pence was likely going to put his duty to the Constitution over his fealty to Donald Trump.
The Guardian reports that Thompson may go this route to increase pressure on the people who were privy to the contents of those calls. That pressure could work in multiple directions. If it coughed up evidence from a less-damning non-privileged call, it might help SDNY in battles to access such materials from Rudy’s phones. It might increase pressure on John Eastman, a lawyer who has only inconsistently claimed privilege for his conversations with Trump. Or it might cause one or another of Trump’s bottom-feeders — Stone and Steve Bannon — to take the other out.
Even just identifying the times of such calls, though, would provide a way to understand how White House input into the Willard intersected with Willard communications with the Oath Keepers, Willard directions to Congress, and White House pressure on Congress intersected.